The sale of 48 Chenery Street closed escrow this past Friday with a reported contract price of $1,260,000 ($683 per square foot), up a net 2% since the Glen Park single-family home was purchased for $1,235,000 in May 2006 [see UPDATE below].
And it’s 1 percent over asking on three offers if a reader’s hearsay is correct.
As we noted last month, from July 2006 to July 2010 the median sale price for listed District 5 single-family homes increased over 30 percent while the median sale price in Glen Park was up over 50 percent year-over-year in July (on five sales), down 47% year-over-year in August (on four sales).
UPDATE: While we missed it, luckily a plugged-in reader didn’t.
With a two bathroom remodel in 2008, the resale of 48 Chenery isn’t apples-to-apples. And while the value of the single family home increased $25,000 from 2006 to 2010, that’s perhaps less than half the cost of what was invested in said remodel.
So let’s just say up a gross 2% in price but down a net 3% in value over the past four years after accounting for recorded improvements.
∙ Apples To Apples (Versus Median To Median) In Glen Park [SocketSite]
∙ Medians Are Up, But Don’t Confuse That With Increasing “Prices” [SocketSite]
I guess we’ll need to rename Glen Park as Noe South.
Are we still calling this an apple despite the 2008 remodel of two bathrooms, for which the owner reported a cost of $60,000? Not being smug…just asking.
[Editor’s Note: Good catch, since updated, and a bit of smugness is well deserved.]
So not an “apple” but still a really good result — cutting losses — for the seller. If this is up for sale in a few years, we’ll hear (at least from me) “hey, they overpaid, it happens.”
pretty pricey for a dolger-esque stucco job on chenery
Apple or not this is a really strong outcome for the seller. I predicted it would go for 100-150K under asking. But from all reports this was a really nice home so it’s not entirely surprising…
A loss overall, including total cost of ownership, but a great result for the seller here not to lose too much. It’s a pretty damn high price for a 2/2, but it’s basically a converted 3/2.
Is Marina-style a euphemism for “Doelger-type house not located in a western neighborhood or Daly City”?
still very expensive and a testament to the strength of sf even if this is not in real sf.
where else in the world would someone pay this much for this product?
“still very expensive and a testament to the strength of sf even if this is not in real sf.
where else in the world would someone pay this much for this product?”
Can someone provide me with the definitive “Real San Francisco” list. I would have thought broadly speaking this location qualifies…
I live on the next block south–and I tend to think this is the real SF. The location is really perfect: sunny, Muni and buses a block away, freeways right here, BART 10 min. walk away. Can walk to Noe, Glen Park, Bernal, Diamond Heights, Mission very easily. You feel like you are in the country but amenities abound and the views are great. What’s not the real SF here??
“Can someone provide me with the definitive “Real San Francisco” list. I would have thought broadly speaking this location qualifies”
When I drive/walk my visiting out of town friends around the city, most of the neighborhoods they are interested in seeing are all north of California Street (The hills of Russian Nob and Telegraph, as well as Pacific and Presidio Heights, the Marina, Presdio and Golden Gate Bridge) as well as some south of California street (Haight, Cole Valley, Golden Gate Park, North Beach, Union Square, Castro, Duboce, Noe, Mission some parts of SOMA). This is what they tell me they consider the “real SF”.
When people close their eyes and dream of living in San Francisco, I don’t think Glen Park is at the top of their list, though it may be where they will end of living since it is close to 280 and the jobs in the south bay and peninsula.
I don’t know who started the “real San Francisco” canard on this site, but it is obviously tongue in cheek, and I believe it was always (?) a reference to fact that the real estate depression affecting sub-prime land in way out in the suburbs would never affect the “real San Francisco” which was, of course, different. The absolute definitions vary, but the first neighborhoods chopped off were Bayview/Hunters Point and the whole swath of SE San Francisco. As the real estate crisis spread, the “Real San Francisco” became ever smaller. I don’t think anyone is ever really serious using this term, are they?
But anon94123 is right, the “core” of the RealSF is north of California, with everything else seemingly debatable. After all, Noe Valley was just a working class neighborhood, and Glen Park and Bernal even worse, before gentrification started in the 70’s. So they’re not real, they’re just aberrations….lol.
Whoever said Glen Park isn’t the Real SF said it sarcastically, I think. In fact, the term itself is sarcastic. It sprang from the fact that for over a year the D10 and Oceanview + Ingleside areas were faring quite a bit worse, real estate market wise, than the rest of the city. Later on, the first time that we saw a significant volume spike in SF during the last market, it was obvious that very many of those were in the Sunset. Someone sarcastically suggested that “The Sunset was not the Real SF either,” or something to that effect.
Some people are still trying to say that all of the better parts of SF are down 20%, and still pointing to D10 as an example. Using “Real SF,” etc, getting support from the editor: https://socketsite.com/archives/2010/09/the_110_chattanooga_a_express_becomes_a_local.html
[Editor’s Note: Try reading and understanding the entire thread (and subtext about medians), “whether or not values have dropped ‘by up to 30 percent’ in some parts of San Francisco” isn’t quite the same as “all of the better parts of SF are down 20%.”]
Context is precisely the problem there. The D10 insertion was out of context given what Skirunman and AT were saying, and understanding mix. It was you who inserted the mix agent, as D10 remains quite different in behavior. In the context of the argument it reads how it reads. Btw, how many bracketed comments have you dropped on bulls versus bears in the last six months or so? 9000 to zero?
While the overall point of curmudgeon is spot on, the 70s predated by some time the gentrification of those three neighborhoods.
Noe started noticeably shifting mid to late 80s or so, rapidly accelerating in the 90s. Bernal and Glen Park really started gentrifying with the late 90s dot.com influx, rapidly accelerating in the 00s.
nnona…well, my dates were rough, and it really depends on how you define gentrification. My “gentrification started in the 70’s” comment is kinda global, and relates to the general re-emphasis on urban living by the baby boom, and specific to this area of town the huge influx of gay men into the Castro, which really changed the whole nature of this whole slice of San Francisco.
I didn’t move here until 87, but I lived on the northwest slope of Bernal then, and it was definitely gentrifying, and was then perceived as the “affordable” Noe Valley, which was already thought of as too attractive and expensive for the lower rung of the yuppie set. There were lots of younger people buying their first homes and putting in a lot of sweat equity. I think the Good Life Grocery went in around then too, and Cortland really started shifting in the mid 90’s (but retail almost always lags residential).
Believe it or not, the Marina was the Noe or Glen Park of the late 80’s. The Marina was never “bad”, but after the 89 quake I was a real pioneer buying property in an area still in distress and rather inexpensive compared to other north of California neighborhoods. I guess for those who have been around for more than two decades, it is still hard to believe the transformation of Noe and Glen Park from working class neighborhoods to being part of the “real SF”.
“I don’t know who started the “real San Francisco” canard on this site, but it is obviously tongue in cheek, and I believe it was always (?) a reference to fact that the real estate depression affecting sub-prime land in way out in the suburbs would never affect the “real San Francisco” which was, of course, different. The absolute definitions vary, but the first neighborhoods chopped off were Bayview/Hunters Point and the whole swath of SE San Francisco. As the real estate crisis spread, the “Real San Francisco” became ever smaller. I don’t think anyone is ever really serious using this term, are they?”
If you read Burbed, they used the term “Real Bay Area” very similarly. Those outerlying parts of Contra Costa and Napa/Sonoma were first disqualified. And then various parts of Alameda County and certain parts of San Mateo County were disqualified. At some point you were left with SF and the nicer parts of Santa Clara County and San Mateo County, and maybe Lamorinda and nice parts of Marin (I’m not sure, because it focuses on Peninsula/South Bay).
The idea was very similar to how curmudgeon describes it here. First you cut off places like D10 (e.g. Antioch), then you start chopping more and more as the “fortress areas” start dropping in price too.
Here’s an interesting article from back in the day…
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/e/a/1999/06/15/METRO8359.dtl
“First you cut off places like D10 (e.g. Antioch), then you start chopping more and more as the “fortress areas” start dropping in price too”
Three and four years ago that argument made more sense.
“Three and four years ago that argument made more sense.”
It still makes sense now. Oddly, this is exactly how things have been playing out in San Diego and Los Angeles (Westside, Beverly Hills, Santa Monica, Manhattan Beach felt it way after Palmdale/Lancaster), and how it seems things have been playing out in SF thus far too, based on apples and non-apples as well. I have little reason to think SF is all that different thus far.
This is also how it has worked in the outerlying counties of the Bay Area. The last holdouts in the outer boroughs were places with good school districts like Lamorinda, some parts of Marin, Cupertino, Mountain View, Los Altos, Burlingame, and Hillsborough, but even those places are seeing declines now, although at different paces even among themselves.
I believe the last man standing is Palo Alto, which seems to have a hotter real estate market than SF. I think there are even apples in Palo Alto that have increased since, say, 2006.
I won’t vouch for knowing any apples-to-apples data, but Julianna Lee publishes some good monthly sales data on some cities in Santa Clara county:
http://www.julianalee.com/reinfo/monthly.shtml
Actually, Los Angeles, San Diego and San Francisco have all played out rather differently and at different times as well.
At different times and different paces, sure. “differently”? I don’t know. I think the conventional wisdom said that the rich foreigners that would bail out SF were mostly Chinese and maybe some Europeans for SF (priced in Euros!), whereas for LA they said Iranian for the western neighborhoods and Chinese for the eastern neighborhoods. For San Diego, I’m not sure, and with the military there, I’m not even sure if they like foreigners.
Every nicer area of all three regions had pretty much the same story for why the nice neighborhoods wouldn’t be hit because the crisis was “limited to subprime.”
I would guess that government stimulus also helped them slightly differently too because of price points for certain areas.
On the, “it’s all micro” front, my friend down south said that the Manhattan Beach housing blog even separated its apples-to-apples data into the three neighborhoods of Manhattan Beach to make the bubble naysayers happy. Apparently they had an apple issue there because people will teardown tiny cottages and put up much bigger houses. I didn’t even think Manhattan Beach was very big, maybe 30-35K people at most, so that’s pretty micro. He said they even had a curmudgeonly realtor commenter like fluj!
“I think the conventional wisdom said that the rich foreigners that would bail out SF were mostly Chinese and maybe some Europeans for SF (priced in Euros!), ”
Don’t get CW confused with what some people on a website made a lot of hay about. Don’t take the exaggeration they made of “the Chinese solution” the few times they saw that notion, versus the thousands of other reasons why SF would (and actually did; repeat, actually did; repeat again, actually did) fare better than elsewhere and blow it up yet again. You ought to know better. CW is what you and other bears read on national blogs and regurgitate on here daily. Very little content was about Asian buyers or European buyers saving the SF market. All semi-kidding anecdotes about French overheard at open houses aside.
tho i agree in general about these characterizations of the origin and meaning of ‘real sf’ i think they don’t capture all of it.
as the bubble inflated many people were priced out of good (read ‘real’)areas and they substituted marginal areas into their buying plans. as more people jumped in it began to re-enforce the notion that gentrification was here to stay. but now that the tide is receding we see many folks that paid real sf prices for non real sf locations. these folks are getting slammed as they try to sell bosworth st for the price of california st.
real sf has much more strength than non real sf so that’s why the bulls mock the bears when they try to assert that b/c foolish people paid way too much for marginal areas that pac hgts will get to 40-50% off.
iow, as someone pointed out, the good seats will still be in high demand and cost more to buy than to rent.
@ anonee,
But what about the general area being “non Real SF” ? I’m speaking of Glen Park itself, not a busy street in Glen Park. Properties like the one atop the thread?
I’ve noticed a bit of a shift on here. Even some of the biggest bears are conceding that a not unappreciable monied sector of the city has shifted southward a bit. Would you agree? Or do you think Glen Park is destined to return to its blue collar roots?
i agree with your ‘shifting south analysis’ and that the gentrification that occurred in noe/glenpark/bernal is sustainable. but i do not think that these areas merit these prices if there is softness in better areas. i’d take marginal d7 over good bernal. iow, if it is revealed that the emperor has no clothes, real sf will fare much better than ‘i could not afford real sf so i bought real sf adjacent’.
There has been a demonstrable shift in the past twenty years towards the south (NV, Glen Park, Bernal, etc) because of freeway access to high paying south bay jobs. That has been discussed again and again here, and is, I think, irrefutable. Glen Park is even “favored” because it has good BART access downtown and good freeway access South, so there is a huge amount of flexibility. I don’t see these neighborhoods returning to “working class” roots anytime soon.
I disagree with anonee a little, because I think the buyer in NV/GP/Bernal is different from D7, and many are probably ONLY in the market for something on that side of town. That said, I’m sure there will be fallback from marginal neighborhoods within this area…when Glen Park and Noe Valley get more affordable, Sunnyside and Portola get a lot less desirable quickly…it the usual ebb and flow.
“…i’d take marginal d7 over good bernal”
Anonee: Your underlying assumption is that buyers are only choosing places like NV, GP or BH because they have been priced out of “real” San Francisco. Simply not true. From my own experience I had the opportunity to buy in Cole Valley but passed because it was not for me. Many people would not ever consider living in the areas you mention.
“Don’t get CW confused with what some people on a website made a lot of hay about.”
You’re really funny when you’re trying to be dismissive. “Some people on a website”? Agents in these cities asserted this all the time. It was repeated in major news media in these cities. And in fact, the rich foreigners were given as a reason for why prices had gone up during the boom in the first place. Again, my friend from Santa Monica remembers hearing how prices were booming in 2004-2006 because of “all the rich Persians buying here.”
And let’s get this straight too. Conventional wisdom is what realtors say, not bears on SocketSite. It’s what NAR says and what CAR says and what’s repeated in the news media daily. It’s the general belief that real estate can never go down in price and all that stuff about “location location location” and “all real estate is local” and any number of other things.
Being a real estate bear is a contrarian position.
Even in this crappy real estate climate, most people I know who have bought in the last 2 years think they can live somewhere for 3-5 years and flip it for a substantial gain, and everyone I know who has put their house on the market has taken it off with the hopes that they’ll see substantial appreciation in the next 2 years and can put it back on the market then. This is from years of brainwashing by the conventional wisdom of realtors and Baby Boomers.
It’s funny when you make such substantial judgments about people you don’t know.
These cities? What are you talking about? You said SF, specifically:
“I think the conventional wisdom said that the rich foreigners that would bail out SF were mostly Chinese and maybe some Europeans for SF (priced in Euros!), ”
You have got to stop going back and changing what you say all the time. Nobody was talking about Santa Monica there.
Your idea of conventional wisdom differs than mine. But if you’re saying that most people who post online nowadays think buying r.e. is the thing to do, you’re lying.
I was talking about SF, LA, and San Diego earlier, please keep up. I made a broader point that what’s happening in these three cities is similar, even if different in timing.
In SF, I certainly heard things about the rich foreigners, mainly people from China, buying up condos and houses. This was from agents and non-agents. And you even saw some of this on SocketSite (along the lines of, I went to a One Rincon Hill social function and everyone was speaking Chinese)
I’m talking about overall conventional wisdom, not what bears on bear-focused blogs say. I don’t know what “most people who post online” say. That’s a pretty big universe.
So the overall conventional wisdom is that the housing market is doing OK and going to improve very soon? do tell. As for your SF-specific point earlier, I said what I said.
I don’t know about you, but way too many people keep telling me “it’s a good time to buy!” They’re all anchored in bubble prices and think a little discount is a good thing. If they are Baby Boomers, they are even more likely to say this.
The problem is that, at least when I look around, is that many of the houses that are available are of very low quality, whether because of bad bones, bad additions, bad location, bad design, etc. The good houses get snapped up very quickly and tend to be more competitive, but there are very few of those.
sf renegade,
“The problem is that, at least when I look around, is that many of the houses that are available are of very low quality, whether because of bad bones, bad additions, bad location, bad design, etc. The good houses get snapped up very quickly and tend to be more competitive, but there are very few of those.”
does that tell you something? doesn’t that confirm to you that the ‘good seats’ still get bid up-even in this world wide correction?
you bears talk down the market everyday, and yet you complain about the lack of good supply.
“The good houses get snapped up very quickly and tend to be more competitive, but there are very few of those.””
Now take that and factor in the relative desirability of various neighborhoods, versus what is available. Yet you argued with me about imbalance for some reason.
No one other than realtors have indicated to me that “it’s a good time to buy.” Most of my family lives in regions hard hit by the real estate bubble’s collapse and the last thing any of them want to talk about is real estate.
On my friends recently bought a house in San Mateo though so perhaps there is something to your thesis.
I actually think that it is a good time to buy multi-family investment property in severely depressed areas, but only as a speculative investment. I assume you mean SFH in San Francisco though.
“does that tell you something? doesn’t that confirm to you that the ‘good seats’ still get bid up-even in this world wide correction?”
As I’ve mentioned before, this doesn’t mean much. The good houses are basically getting bid up to around where the crappy houses were bid up a few years ago, maybe a bit higher. That doesn’t mean the market is good. The good houses always deserved good prices, but it was the fact that truly terrible houses got such great prices during the boom that is notable.
“I actually think that it is a good time to buy multi-family investment property in severely depressed areas, but only as a speculative investment. I assume you mean SFH in San Francisco though.”
I do mean SFH in SF, but agree that multi-family properties in certain areas that are not SF are a good way to invest in property if you’re so inclined, as I mentioned in another thread.
D11 homeowner. Earlier this month, I was at a dinner party in Paris. As it happened, there were several others who identified themselves as being from “San Francisco”. Actually, one couple lived in Daly City. The other, in Sausalito.
I wonder what the reaction of our French hosts would have been, if I would have said to these people, “err… you do not REALLY live in San Francisco. For that matter, according to a user called anonee on socketsite.com, even I don’t live in ‘real’ San Francisco.”
When viewed from the right perspective – at least the perspective I prefer -, so much of the discussion on this site is irrelevant. This mix of petty negativity, envy, schadenfreude and soulless beancounting “rent vs. own calc” represents some of the WORST of San Francisco, when the city has so much great to offer. You guys seriously are the worst advertisement to anyone considering to move to the city!
And yes, I imagine it comes as a shock to some that someone living in such a ghetto as D11 attends dinner parties in Paris. But as I sit down to a dinner of vegetables I grew in my own backyard, I’ll raise a glass of wine tonight to my LUCK to be able to own a cute and comfortable house in San Francisco.